The Holodomor in The Ukraine in 1931-32.
Between three and eight million died then,
and the papers kept on it remain secret.
It is most clearly remembered by survivors
through the shame they felt for eating their pets.
Then there is the Shoa of European Jewry,
1937-45, and the Meds Yeghern,
the genocide by Turks of the Armenians
in 1915-still a state secret in Turkey today.
Or at a stretch the deaths in the first
concentration camps, in The Boer War
as run by the British in 1901.
More recently there was mass starvation
as crops repeatedly failed in North Korea,
and Year Zero in Cambodia under the Kmer Rouge.
There are many more, large and small,
what with how they go under-reported.
My favourite would have to be the next one,
if only because it is the one we may yet stop.
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